OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Analysis of Task-Agnostic Distillation Methods for Compressing Transformer Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models have become a vital component in modern NLP, achieving state of the art performance in a variety of tasks. However, they are often inefficient for real-world deployment due to their expensive inference costs. Knowledge distillation is a promising technique to improve their efficiency while retaining most of their effectiveness. In this paper, we reproduce, compare and analyze several representative methods for task-agnostic (general-purpose) distillation of Transformer language models. Our target of study includes Output Distribution (OD) transfer, Hidden State (HS) transfer with various layer mapping strategies, and Multi-Head Attention (MHA) transfer based on MiniLMv2. Through our extensive experiments, we study the effectiveness of each method for various student architectures in both monolingual (English) and multilingual settings. Overall, we show that MHA transfer based on MiniLMv2 is generally the best option for distillation and explain the potential reasons behind its success. Moreover, we show that HS transfer remains as a competitive baseline, especially under a sophisticated layer mapping strategy, while OD transfer consistently lags behind other approaches. Findings from this study helped us deploy efficient yet effective student models for latency-critical applications.
Revisiting Multi-modal 3D Semantic Segmentation in Real-world Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

LiDAR and camera are two critical sensors for multi-modal 3D semantic segmentation and are supposed to be fused efficiently and robustly to promise safety in various real-world scenarios. However, existing multi-modal methods face two key challenges: 1) difficulty with efficient deployment and real-time execution; and 2) drastic performance degradation under weak calibration between LiDAR and cameras. To address these challenges, we propose CPGNet-LCF, a new multi-modal fusion framework extending the LiDAR-only CPGNet. CPGNet-LCF solves the first challenge by inheriting the easy deployment and real-time capabilities of CPGNet. For the second challenge, we introduce a novel weak calibration knowledge distillation strategy during training to improve the robustness against the weak calibration. CPGNet-LCF achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes and SemanticKITTI benchmarks. Remarkably, it can be easily deployed to run in 20ms per frame on a single Tesla V100 GPU using TensorRT TF16 mode. Furthermore, we benchmark performance over four weak calibration levels, demonstrating the robustness of our proposed approach.
Static Code Analysis in the AI Era: An In-depth Exploration of the Concept, Function, and Potential of Intelligent Code Analysis Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The escalating complexity of software systems and accelerating development cycles pose a significant challenge in managing code errors and implementing business logic. Traditional techniques, while cornerstone for software quality assurance, exhibit limitations in handling intricate business logic and extensive codebases. To address these challenges, we introduce the Intelligent Code Analysis Agent (ICAA), a novel concept combining AI models, engineering process designs, and traditional non-AI components. The ICAA employs the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 or GPT-4 to automatically detect and diagnose code errors and business logic inconsistencies. In our exploration of this concept, we observed a substantial improvement in bug detection accuracy, reducing the false-positive rate to 66\% from the baseline's 85\%, and a promising recall rate of 60.8\%. However, the token consumption cost associated with LLMs, particularly the average cost for analyzing each line of code, remains a significant consideration for widespread adoption. Despite this challenge, our findings suggest that the ICAA holds considerable potential to revolutionize software quality assurance, significantly enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of bug detection in the software development process. We hope this pioneering work will inspire further research and innovation in this field, focusing on refining the ICAA concept and exploring ways to mitigate the associated costs.
HybridChain: Fast, Accurate, and Secure Transaction Processing with Distributed Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

In order to fully unlock the transformative power of distributed ledgers and blockchains, it is crucial to develop innovative consensus algorithms that can overcome the obstacles of security, scalability, and interoperability, which currently hinder their widespread adoption. This paper introduces HybridChain that combines the advantages of sharded blockchain and DAG distributed ledger, and a consensus algorithm that leverages decentralized learning. Our approach involves validators exchanging perceptions as votes to assess potential conflicts between transactions and the witness set, representing input transactions in the UTXO model. These perceptions collectively contribute to an intermediate belief regarding the validity of transactions. By integrating their beliefs with those of other validators, localized decisions are made to determine validity. Ultimately, a final consensus is achieved through a majority vote, ensuring precise and efficient validation of transactions. Our proposed approach is compared to the existing DAG-based scheme IOTA and the sharded blockchain Omniledger through extensive simulations. The results show that IOTA has high throughput and low latency but sacrifices accuracy and is vulnerable to orphanage attacks especially with low transaction rates. Omniledger achieves stable accuracy by increasing shards but has increased latency. In contrast, the proposed HybridChain exhibits fast, accurate, and secure transaction processing, and excellent scalability.
A Survey of Methods for Handling Disk Data Imbalance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Class imbalance exists in many classification problems, and since the data is designed for accuracy, imbalance in data classes can lead to classification challenges with a few classes having higher misclassification costs. The Backblaze dataset, a widely used dataset related to hard discs, has a small amount of failure data and a large amount of health data, which exhibits a serious class imbalance. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of research in the field of imbalanced data classification. The discussion is organized into three main aspects: data-level methods, algorithmic-level methods, and hybrid methods. For each type of method, we summarize and analyze the existing problems, algorithmic ideas, strengths, and weaknesses. Additionally, the challenges of unbalanced data classification are discussed, along with strategies to address them. It is convenient for researchers to choose the appropriate method according to their needs.
How to Rationally Select Your Delegatee in PoS
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper centers around a simple yet crucial question for everyday users: How should one choose their delegated validators within proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols, particularly in the context of Ethereum 2.0? This has been a long-overlooked gap, as existing studies have primarily focused on inter-committee (validator set) behaviors and activities, while neglecting the dynamic formation of committees, especially for individual stakeholders seeking reliable validators. Our study bridges this gap by diving into the delegation process (normal users delegate their small-value tokens to delegatees who later act as validators) before entering an actual consensus phase. We propose a Bayesian model to quantify normal users' trust in delegatees, which we further incorporate into a game-theoretical model to simulate users' reactions against a set of critical factors identified through extensive research (including 10+ staking service provider as well as 30+ PoS blockchains). Our results reveal that users tend to choose their delegatees and utilize their tokens by carefully weighing the delegation cost, the behaviors of other users, and the reputation of delegatees, ultimately reaching a Nash equilibrium. Unfortunately, the collective trend significantly increases the likelihood of token concentration on a small number of delegatees.
Welfare Diplomacy: Benchmarking Language Model Cooperation
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

The growing capabilities and increasingly widespread deployment of AI systems necessitate robust benchmarks for measuring their cooperative capabilities. Unfortunately, most multi-agent benchmarks are either zero-sum or purely cooperative, providing limited opportunities for such measurements. We introduce a general-sum variant of the zero-sum board game Diplomacy -- called Welfare Diplomacy -- in which players must balance investing in military conquest and domestic welfare. We argue that Welfare Diplomacy facilitates both a clearer assessment of and stronger training incentives for cooperative capabilities. Our contributions are: (1) proposing the Welfare Diplomacy rules and implementing them via an open-source Diplomacy engine; (2) constructing baseline agents using zero-shot prompted language models; and (3) conducting experiments where we find that baselines using state-of-the-art models attain high social welfare but are exploitable. Our work aims to promote societal safety by aiding researchers in developing and assessing multi-agent AI systems. Code to evaluate Welfare Diplomacy and reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/mukobi/welfare-diplomacy.
Differential Evolution Algorithm based Hyper-Parameters Selection of Convolutional Neural Network for Speech Command Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Speech Command Recognition (SCR), which deals with identification of short uttered speech commands, is crucial for various applications, including IoT devices and assistive technology. Despite the promise shown by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in SCR tasks, their efficacy relies heavily on hyper-parameter selection, which is typically laborious and time-consuming when done manually. This paper introduces a hyper-parameter selection method for CNNs based on the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, aiming to enhance performance in SCR tasks. Training and testing with the Google Speech Command (GSC) dataset, the proposed approach showed effectiveness in classifying speech commands. Moreover, a comparative analysis with Genetic Algorithm based selections and other deep CNN (DCNN) models highlighted the efficiency of the proposed DE algorithm in hyper-parameter selection for CNNs in SCR tasks.
LLaMA Rider: Spurring Large Language Models to Explore the Open World
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, various studies have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to help decision-making and planning in environments, and try to align the LLMs' knowledge with the world conditions. Nonetheless, the capacity of LLMs to continuously acquire environmental knowledge and adapt in an open world remains uncertain. In this paper, we propose an approach to spur LLMs to explore the open world, gather experiences, and learn to improve their task-solving capabilities. In this approach, a multi-round feedback-revision mechanism is utilized to encourage LLMs to actively select appropriate revision actions guided by feedback information from the environment. This facilitates exploration and enhances the model's performance. Besides, we integrate sub-task relabeling to assist LLMs in maintaining consistency in sub-task planning and help the model learn the combinatorial nature between tasks, enabling it to complete a wider range of tasks through training based on the acquired exploration experiences. By evaluation in Minecraft, an open-ended sandbox world, we demonstrate that our approach LLaMA-Rider enhances the efficiency of the LLM in exploring the environment, and effectively improves the LLM's ability to accomplish more tasks through fine-tuning with merely 1.3k instances of collected data, showing minimal training costs compared to the baseline using reinforcement learning.
Injective Rank Metric Trapdoor Functions with Homogeneous Errors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In rank-metric cryptography, a vector from a finite dimensional linear space over a finite field is viewed as the linear space spanned by its entries. The rank decoding problem which is the analogue of the problem of decoding a random linear code consists in recovering a basis of a random noise vector that was used to perturb a set of random linear equations sharing a secret solution. Assuming the intractability of this problem, we introduce a new construction of injective one-way trapdoor functions. Our solution departs from the frequent way of building public key primitives from error-correcting codes where, to establish the security, ad hoc assumptions about a hidden structure are made. Our method produces a hard-to-distinguish linear code together with low weight vectors which constitute the secret that helps recover the inputs.The key idea is to focus on trapdoor functions that take sufficiently enough input vectors sharing the same support. Applying then the error correcting algorithm designed for Low Rank Parity Check (LRPC) codes, we obtain an inverting algorithm that recovers the inputs with overwhelming probability.
pose-format: Library for Viewing, Augmenting, and Handling .pose Files
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Managing and analyzing pose data is a complex task, with challenges ranging from handling diverse file structures and data types to facilitating effective data manipulations such as normalization and augmentation. This paper presents \texttt{pose-format}, a comprehensive toolkit designed to address these challenges by providing a unified, flexible, and easy-to-use interface. The library includes a specialized file format that encapsulates various types of pose data, accommodating multiple individuals and an indefinite number of time frames, thus proving its utility for both image and video data. Furthermore, it offers seamless integration with popular numerical libraries such as NumPy, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, thereby enabling robust machine-learning applications. Through benchmarking, we demonstrate that our \texttt{.pose} file format offers vastly superior performance against prevalent formats like OpenPose, with added advantages like self-contained pose specification. Additionally, the library includes features for data normalization, augmentation, and easy-to-use visualization capabilities, both in Python and Browser environments. \texttt{pose-format} emerges as a one-stop solution, streamlining the complexities of pose data management and analysis.
A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks, which mostly solve this task in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we propose to decompose the CSC workflow into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks so that the rich external knowledge about the Chinese language can be leveraged more directly and efficiently. Specifically, we design a plug-and-play detection-and-reasoning module that is compatible with existing SOTA non-autoregressive CSC models to further boost their performance. We find that the detection-and-reasoning module trained for one model can also benefit other models. We also study the primary interpretability provided by the task decomposition. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed module.
HierarchicalContrast: A Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning Framework for Cross-Domain Zero-Shot Slot Filling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In task-oriented dialogue scenarios, cross-domain zero-shot slot filling plays a vital role in leveraging source domain knowledge to learn a model with high generalization ability in unknown target domain where annotated data is unavailable. However, the existing state-of-the-art zero-shot slot filling methods have limited generalization ability in target domain, they only show effective knowledge transfer on seen slots and perform poorly on unseen slots. To alleviate this issue, we present a novel Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework (HiCL) for zero-shot slot filling. Specifically, we propose a coarse- to fine-grained contrastive learning based on Gaussian-distributed embedding to learn the generalized deep semantic relations between utterance-tokens, by optimizing inter- and intra-token distribution distance. This encourages HiCL to generalize to the slot types unseen at training phase. Furthermore, we present a new iterative label set semantics inference method to unbiasedly and separately evaluate the performance of unseen slot types which entangled with their counterparts (i.e., seen slot types) in the previous zero-shot slot filling evaluation methods. The extensive empirical experiments on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable or even better performance than the current state-of-the-art zero-shot slot filling approaches.
An Intrinsic Integrity-Driven Rating Model for a Sustainable Reputation System
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

In the era of digital markets, the challenge for consumers is discerning quality amidst information asymmetry. While traditional markets use brand mechanisms to address this issue, transferring such systems to internet-based P2P markets, where misleading practices like fake ratings are rampant, remains challenging. Current internet platforms strive to counter this through verification algorithms, but these efforts find themselves in a continuous tug-of-war with counterfeit actions. Exploiting the transparency, immutability, and traceability of blockchain technology, this paper introduces a robust reputation voting system grounded in it. Unlike existing blockchain-based reputation systems, our model harnesses an intrinsically economically incentivized approach to bolster agent integrity. We optimize this model to mirror real-world user behavior, preserving the reputation system's foundational sustainability. Through Monte-Carlo simulations, using both uniform and power-law distributions enabled by an innovative inverse transform method, we traverse a broad parameter landscape, replicating real-world complexity. The findings underscore the promise of a sustainable, transparent, and formidable reputation mechanism. Given its structure, our framework can potentially function as a universal, sustainable oracle for offchain-onchain bridging, aiding entities in perpetually cultivating their reputation. Future integration with technologies like Ring Signature and Zero Knowledge Proof could amplify the system's privacy facets, rendering it particularly influential in the ever-evolving digital domain.
BibRank: Automatic Keyphrase Extraction Platform Using~Metadata
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic Keyphrase Extraction involves identifying essential phrases in a document. These keyphrases are crucial in various tasks such as document classification, clustering, recommendation, indexing, searching, summarization, and text simplification. This paper introduces a platform that integrates keyphrase datasets and facilitates the evaluation of keyphrase extraction algorithms. The platform includes BibRank, an automatic keyphrase extraction algorithm that leverages a rich dataset obtained by parsing bibliographic data in BibTeX format. BibRank combines innovative weighting techniques with positional, statistical, and word co-occurrence information to extract keyphrases from documents. The platform proves valuable for researchers and developers seeking to enhance their keyphrase extraction algorithms and advance the field of natural language processing.
Insuring Smiles: Predicting routine dental coverage using Spark ML
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Finding suitable health insurance coverage can be challenging for individuals and small enterprises in the USA. The Health Insurance Exchange Public Use Files (Exchange PUFs) dataset provided by CMS offers valuable information on health and dental policies [1]. In this paper, we leverage machine learning algorithms to predict if a health insurance plan covers routine dental services for adults. By analyzing plan type, region, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, and copayments, we employ Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boost, Factorization Model and Support Vector Machine algorithms. Our goal is to provide a clinical strategy for individuals and families to select the most suitable insurance plan based on income and expenses.
Table-GPT: Table-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Language models, such as GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable abilities to follow diverse human instructions and perform a wide range of tasks. However, when probing language models using a range of basic table-understanding tasks, we observe that today's language models are still sub-optimal in many table-related tasks, likely because they are pre-trained predominantly on \emph{one-dimensional} natural-language texts, whereas relational tables are \emph{two-dimensional} objects. In this work, we propose a new "\emph{table-tuning}" paradigm, where we continue to train/fine-tune language models like GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, using diverse table-tasks synthesized from real tables as training data, with the goal of enhancing language models' ability to understand tables and perform table tasks. We show that our resulting Table-GPT models demonstrate (1) better \emph{table-understanding} capabilities, by consistently outperforming the vanilla GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, on a wide-range of table tasks, including holdout unseen tasks, and (2) strong \emph{generalizability}, in its ability to respond to diverse human instructions to perform new table-tasks, in a manner similar to GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT.
Is Certifying $\ell_p$ Robustness Still Worthwhile?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Over the years, researchers have developed myriad attacks that exploit the ubiquity of adversarial examples, as well as defenses that aim to guard against the security vulnerabilities posed by such attacks. Of particular interest to this paper are defenses that provide provable guarantees against the class of $\ell_p$-bounded attacks. Certified defenses have made significant progress, taking robustness certification from toy models and datasets to large-scale problems like ImageNet classification. While this is undoubtedly an interesting academic problem, as the field has matured, its impact in practice remains unclear, thus we find it useful to revisit the motivation for continuing this line of research. There are three layers to this inquiry, which we address in this paper: (1) why do we care about robustness research? (2) why do we care about the $\ell_p$-bounded threat model? And (3) why do we care about certification as opposed to empirical defenses? In brief, we take the position that local robustness certification indeed confers practical value to the field of machine learning. We focus especially on the latter two questions from above. With respect to the first of the two, we argue that the $\ell_p$-bounded threat model acts as a minimal requirement for safe application of models in security-critical domains, while at the same time, evidence has mounted suggesting that local robustness may lead to downstream external benefits not immediately related to robustness. As for the second, we argue that (i) certification provides a resolution to the cat-and-mouse game of adversarial attacks; and furthermore, that (ii) perhaps contrary to popular belief, there may not exist a fundamental trade-off between accuracy, robustness, and certifiability, while moreover, certified training techniques constitute a particularly promising way for learning robust models.